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NORTH WALES BRANCH Newsletter NORTH WALES BRANCH Newsletter 2020 2020 CONTENTS 3. A message from tHe CHair 22. The Perils of tHe WHite-letter Hairstreak These are unprecedented times… A butterfly under attack! 4. My first year of motH trapping 25. An S-curve analysis The first of many I’m sure! Graphic displays of population trends 6. Silver-studded Blue populations… 29. Blaenau Ffestiniog Report A very interesting piece of research Sightings from the former slate capital 14. A year of cHange 32. Anglesey motH recording All change at BC Wales A moth and meterological summary! 16. A crossword witH pictures 35. The Wooly Bear and tHe S4 bus A little light relief! A tale about a near-miss! 18. NortH Wales brancH pages 37. A new motH list for Wales Comment and information News of an inventory of Welsh moths Cover photograph of a Red Underwing by Mark Sheridan Published by the North Wales Branch of Butterfly Conservation. Please note that the opinions expressed in this newsletter are not necessarily those of the Society or the Branch Butterfly Conservation. Company limited by guarantee, registeredin England (2206468) Registered Office: Manor Yard, East LulwortH, WareHam, Dorset, BH20 5QP. CHarity registered in England and Wales (254937) and in Scotland (SCO39268) VAT No GB 991 2771 89 Gwarchod Glöynnod Byw Cwmni a gyfyngir drwy warant, wedi’i gofrestru yn Lloegr (2206468). Swyddfa Gofrestredig: Manor Yard, East LulwortH, WareHam, Dorset, BH20 5QP. Elusen wedi’i cHofrestru yng NgHymru a Lloegr (254937) ac yn Yr Alban (SCO39268).Rhif TAW GB 991 2771 89 2 2020 A MESSAGE FROM THE CHAIR As I write this on the afternoon of Thursday 19th March all schools in Wales are due to close by tomorrow and the Welsh Education Minister is suggesting they may not reopen till September. I’ve no doubt more drastic measures will follow. You will all now be familiar with the advice to achieve social distancing to limit the spread of Coronavirus. In the UK, this guidance is currently advisory but in Italy, Spain and France similar measures are backed by the full force of the law. Against this backdrop your Branch Committee have reluctantly concluded that organizing a programme of events where Members meet to see butterflies, attend talks or moth trapping events is inappropriate and contrary to current guidance. Consequently, there will be no Spring/Summer Programme of Events this year. The North Wales Branch AGM/Members’ Day is scheduled for Saturday 10th October at Pensychnant Conservation Centre (details can be found later in this newsletter). We have a full day’s programme organized and will review whether this takes place nearer the time. In my garden, I’ve already seen a few Small Tortoiseshells and a Peacock and it won’t be long before the first Orange Tips are on the wing. For those of you who run moth traps those first harbingers of spring such as the March Moth, the Oak Beauty and the Streamer should soon be making an appearance. So please share your sightings on our Facebook page or Twitter feed and, remember to keep sending in your records! These are unprecedented times the like of which none of us have seen in peacetime. The measures we are being urged to adopt will hopefully slow the spread of the virus but they will also have an economic impact. This is likely to affect all charities, Butterfly Conservation included, so never has your continued support been more important. Please follow the guidelines on social distancing but enjoy and appreciate butterflies and moths in your garden or while taking exercise. Keep well, stay safe and look after yourselves and others. Ilija Vukomanovic Branch Chairman 3 2020 MY FIRST YEAR OF MOTH TRAPPING by Ian M. Spence I first moved to Wales, to Pwllglas, in April 1987. Sometime during my first year or two living there I was able to borrow a moth trap for a few days and remember catching Large Yellow Underwing and Silver Y amongst others. I wasn’t able to take it up on a regular basis at that time as I had to return the moth trap and I was very busy with bird ringing. Late in 2018 I heard that I had been awarded a grant, from Cofnod, to buy a moth trap, battery and some accessories. I first used it on Boxing Day 2018 and caught one moth, a Mottled Umber. My next attempt, in the garden, at Sychdyn, was on 21 March. That was followed by 13 further nights of trapping in the garden and eight at Rhydymwyn Nature Reserve. The trap I had bought was low-key, just a 6w actinic bulb with a portable Heath trap. To avoid problems I used pop-rivets to hold the aluminium sheets in place as I had no real desire to take it anywhere in bits. I didn’t go for a more powerful light because I thought there would be a good chance that I could end up with too many moths for me to cope with. My method was to put out the trap as it was going dark and retrieve the trap in the morning when I was up and dressed. I was quickly frustrated that some moths escaped – they had not been inside the trap but on the baffles or the top surface of the trap. Luckily, I went to a meeting of the Moth Group at Pensychnant and had a very stimulating evening talking with the people there about how best to deal with catches. Mark Sheridan suggested I buy a mosquito net so that when I open the trap under the net, I would lose no moths as they could not escape. I realised that I could do something similar to capture all moths in or on the trap by covering it with a large, plastic bag and clipping it closed around the trap. 4 2020 This would allow me to carry the trap and moths to where I would set up with tables and a chair, under the mosquito net, with clear plastic pots, one for each moth, books, camera and laptop. These two modifications to my method were hugely successful and I don’t think I lost a single moth after using the bag and mosquito net. On opening-up the trap I put each moth in a different pot and when all were potted I then started to take photographs of the top surfaces of the moths against a background of graph paper with a 2mm grid. I imported the photos to the laptop and did most of my identification working from the images on the laptop and comparing them with illustrations in three main books: Manley (2nd ed. 2015), Waring, Townsend and Lewington (3rd ed. 2017) and Sterling, Parsons and Lewington (2012). There were some moths that had me stumped and I needed help to identify them. In the early days I was very grateful for help and corrections from Helen Bantock, micro-moth Recorder for VC51 who lives in London and Peter Lack, a friend who lives in Suffolk. I also sought some help from the Moths UK Flying Tonight facebook page. I would have liked some help from someone closer to home but that was not forthcoming. I would send copies of my photos and, where possible, people either confirmed my identifications or corrected me. As the season went on I found that a photo of the top surfaces of the upper wings was not enough to identify all moths. The upper surfaces of underwings and, in some cases, the under surfaces of underwings also needed to be photographed. With some Moths I was asked if I had kept a specimen for dissection and examination of the internal genitalia. Coming from a birding background, with which shooting specimens had stopped many years before I was born, I was not minded to keep such specimens. I wonder if it would be possible to establish criteria for external, microscopic examination to identify species. I was also mentally struggling with the reality that not all moths can be readily identified without dissection. These issues were firmly brought to the fore during July and August when I had my biggest catches (the largest was 147 identified moths, mainly macros, at Rhydymwyn on 25 July) and the catches had increasing numbers of dark, worn Noctuids that I was struggling to match to illustrations in the books, 5 2020 or even later, at home when checking the UK Moths website. I was very grateful for help, by email, with these awkward moths. Since August I did not manage to do much trapping as I had other responsibilities, including producing a bird report for NE Wales for 2018. I have been to two further meetings of the Moth Group and have been grateful for help in identifying queries, either from photos or once, from potted specimens that I released when I got home. I have now identified 101 species, with 56 in the garden and 75 at Rhydymwyn. At Rhydymwyn I have caught 32 species also trapped by others before me and 28 new species for the reserve. The reserve total now stands at 313 species. The majority of the moths that have been identified, though some are still part of an aggregate, have been entered into the Cofnod database and the spreadsheet of the North Wales Lepidopterists (Andrew Graham). I am considering joining the Garden Moth Scheme in 2020 as an incentive to continue this new adventure! SILVER-STUDDED BLUE POPULATIONS ON THE CREUDDYN PENINSULA AND BEYOND by Siôn Dafis Pen y Gogarth, the Great Orme, is famous for all sorts of reasons – but for naturalists, it stands apart for its endemics.
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